The Seats

My father bought Philadelphia 76ers season tickets sometime around 1970. Fifty-five years later, we are giving them up.

The buildings changed. The names on the buildings changed. The coaches changed. The rosters changed. The uniforms changed. The mascots changed. The league changed. The seats themselves shifted slightly over time. The Spectrum eventually gave way to its successor, the arena whose corporate name seems to rotate every few years, and someday there will be another new building entirely. Professional sports franchises have become very good at replacing their homes - or at least their naming rights - every couple of decades. But the tickets stayed.

My father was a basketball guy long before he ever stepped inside that arena. Growing up in Philadelphia, he played the way so many kids did in those days - on playground courts around the city with friends, in games where reputations traveled faster than the players themselves. There were always stories about the best neighborhood guys, the ones whose names preceded them onto the court, and the ones who went on to play at the great local colleges - Temple, St. Joe’s, La Salle, Villanova - before a rare few eventually put on the uniform of the professional team that represented the city. Basketball was part of his identity long before it became part of mine.

And in fairness, I became a basketball guy, too. My earliest days with the game were at Seger Playground at 10th and Lombard, across the street from our house. From there, it turned into endless backyard sessions, pickup games, leagues, camps, campuses, endless hours chasing a ball around any court I could find. It’s something my father and I have always shared.

By the time my father bought those tickets, the Sixers had already produced one of the greatest teams in basketball history. The 1967 championship team - Wilt Chamberlain, Hal Greer, Billy Cunningham, and the rest - won 68 games and ended the Celtics’ long hold on the league. In the nearly sixty years since then, the franchise has won the title once more.

1983. That team still lives in Philadelphia like folklore. Julius Erving gliding through the air. Moses Malone devouring rebounds. Andrew Toney. Bobby Jones. Maurice Cheeks. Moses famously predicted the playoff run with one word repeated three times: Fo’, fo’, fo’. He missed by one game.

By the time I came along, those banners were already hanging quietly in the rafters like reminders of something the city hoped might happen again. My earliest memories of the games are fuzzy because I didn’t even have my own seat yet. I sat on my father’s lap or my mother’s lap just a few feet from the floor. To a small kid, it felt like being dropped directly into the sport. Players I knew from basketball cards were suddenly real. Their sweat fell onto the hardwood, close enough for me to smell it. Sneakers squeaked inches away. Coaches barked at referees. Referees barked back. The whole thing felt less like entertainment and more like watching a neighborhood game that had somehow grown enormous. It was personal.

Eventually, I got my own seat, and that’s when the games truly became something shared between my father and me. Even when we weren’t sitting there together, we were connected through the team - trades, draft picks, coaching changes, winning streaks, losing streaks. Mostly losing streaks. Looking back now, I realize those seats weren’t really about basketball at all.

Over the years, we saw just about everyone come through that building. Magic Johnson. Larry Bird. Michael Jordan was doing things that made the entire crowd shake its head. Muggsy Bogues and Manute Bol - the shortest and tallest players the league has ever seen. I watched Kobe Bryant there too, first when he was still a high school kid from Lower Merion that everyone around Philadelphia was whispering about, and later when he became one of the fiercest competitors basketball has ever known.

Those seats came with non-NBA characters, too. Gloria has been working those aisles for what feels like as long as we’ve been season ticket holders, guiding people to their seats with the calm authority of someone who has seen everything an NBA crowd can throw at her. Crazy Irv spent entire games squatting near courtside like it was some kind of spiritual practice, seat flipped up behind him, screaming until hoarse, legs burning, faith unshaken. The Sign Guy still sits just behind us with his quips written on a dry-erase board. If you’ve spent enough time down there, you know exactly who I mean.

The announcers became part of the soundtrack, of course. Dave Zinkoff’s voice could fill the building like a trumpet blast, stretching the syllables of players’ names into something ceremonial. I can still hear him announcing that there were two minutes left in the quarter. Matt Cord carries that tradition now, sitting not very far from where we’ve been sitting all these years.

After enough seasons, those seats become something like a neighborhood. You know the people around you even if you never exchange last names. One woman next to us spent countless games reading a magazine, which never bothered me in the slightest. She had earned the right to sit there and read a magazine. Eventually, the magazine became a phone. Same idea. Nearby, you might occasionally see filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan with his kids. Philadelphia attorney Tom Kline is a diehard fan who usually wears black. If he ever showed up wearing another color, I’d assume something terrible had happened. And just in front of us is the section where one of the team’s owners, David Blitzer, often sits with his family. Because we have mutual acquaintances and because they all seem like good people, I’ve resisted the temptation over the years to yell something at him during particularly frustrating stretches of Sixers basketball. I consider that restraint an example of personal growth and maturity.

Looking back now, I think the moment when our season ticket ownership quietly changed came in 2001. That was the year Allen Iverson dragged the Sixers to the NBA Finals. The city was electric. They beat Indiana, then Toronto in that unforgettable Vince Carter series, then Milwaukee. Game 1 in Los Angeles became legendary - Iverson stepping over Tyronn Lue after hitting that jumper in overtime - and for a moment, the impossible seemed possible. When the series came back to Philadelphia, the whole city felt like it was vibrating. We missed the first home game because of a wedding. I was working at camp in the Poconos and determined to drive home for the next one. I called my dad to make the arrangements. That’s when he told me he had sold the tickets. He sold the first game because we couldn’t go. He sold the second one, too. At the time, I was angry. Now I understand. He made a boatload of money. The Sixers lost that game anyway. Maybe that was the moment when season tickets stopped being something you simply owned and started becoming something you had to manage.

Heartbreak visited those seats, too. None quite like the night Kawhi Leonard’s shot bounced on the rim what felt like a hundred times before finally dropping through against Toronto. That ball seemed to hang in the air forever, each bounce tightening the entire arena until the final one fell through and the building went silent.

The NBA changed in the years that followed. The arenas got bigger. The television money exploded. The Sixers entered the strange years known as The Process. Those seasons trained fans to live on hope like it was a food group. Whoever walked onto that court in a Sixers uniform was still my guy. Well, almost. There was that moment against Atlanta when Ben Simmons passed up an open dunk. For a brief moment that night, my loyalty wavered.

We were fortunate for about 15 years to have a cousin in the financial services business who was willing to cover a large part of the bill to share the seats with his own family and clients. That eventually morphed into him taking on the bulk of the season while my father and I asked for special games back, to be sure we could still be there.

A couple of years ago, my wife, Ann, and I decided to take the tickets over ourselves. To do that, we had to commit to spending more money than I’d really like to admit on basketball tickets. The strange irony is that the very thing that makes those seats so extraordinary is also what makes them impossible. They are incredible seats, but they are priced like luxury goods. Move ten rows back, slide a section over, go upstairs, and suddenly the same game becomes almost affordable. Down where we sit, the resale market often refuses to cooperate with the fantasy of premium pricing. My father swears the original price of those seats was $6.50 apiece. Six dollars and fifty cents.

But those seats also gave us something else over the years - the chance to share the experience. We came to love sitting there together. Friends sat there with us. Family members sat there with us. Sometimes we gave the seats away to people who had never been that close to an NBA game before - kids, especially. Watching someone sit down in those chairs for the first time, hearing the sneakers squeak that close, realizing just how big and fast the players actually are - that never stopped being fun for me. It reminded me of what it felt like when I was a kid sitting on my father or mother’s lap.

Ann didn’t grow up a Sixers fan. Basketball wasn’t really her thing. But like so many of the other interests that I’ve dragged into our lives over the years, she embraced it because it mattered to me. She came to the games. She watched with me at home. She even developed opinions about players. Her favorites were usually the cute ones. Over the years, she has insisted - with complete confidence - that Aaron McKie might be the best-looking Sixer in franchise history. I’ve never really argued with her about that.

Our daughter, Lily, grew up around those seats, too. She might not claim the Sixers as her number-one passion, but as an athlete, she always appreciated what she was watching. And as someone who understands the importance of documenting life properly on Instagram, she certainly appreciated the setting. Sitting there with her, watching her take it all in, was its own kind of full circle.

The deadline to keep those exact seats for next season is March 6 - tomorrow - which feels a little absurd when there is still so much left to the regular season. To be fair, the decision isn’t really about whether we can go to games next year. Anyone can buy tickets. The decision is whether we keep these seats. It’s not like Eagles season tickets, where you own a personal seat license - something that actually becomes an asset. Eagles fans manage eight home games. I’ve been managing forty-one. Yet again, the Eagles win.

After fifty-plus years, those aren’t just tickets. They’re our seats. The chairs feel like our chairs. The cushions feel like our cushions. The most exciting improvement in the history of our seating experience came a few years ago when they lifted our seats a couple of inches on a riser. That tiny change made the endless parade of people walking past slightly more tolerable. These days, they always walk past holding their phones up in the air, trying to film even just a few moments of the game from up close. I’ve been watching it from there for fifty-five years, all forty-eight minutes.

Some nights, the building reminds you it’s bigger than basketball. Ron Brooks - the veteran and double amputee - sings the national anthem, and for a few minutes, everything else disappears. There are nights when someone special walks up to ring that bell. And even though the bell makes no real sound (only the Sixers could find a bell that cannot be heard from even 30 feet away), seeing who they bring up to ring it has a little excitement. There were half-court shots that people made to win stuff (my father’s toss was an air ball, but at least he doesn’t really remember it), there were performances by great pseudo-stars, and there were courtside appearances by so many Philly athletes (among my favorites was Big Dom carrying a replica of the Lombardi Trophy along with him to his front row seat). There were little kids playing at halftime (I even played a high school game in the Spectrum in 1987… I finished with the fewest points of my career), but I was spared the pain of watching Beyonce appear in the ‘01 finals wearing a Lakers jersey (how did they even let her walk out there?). Back in the old days, there were a lot of peanut shells on the floor. I will always remember the peanut shells.

I haven’t even told my father yet.

That part will be hard. Not just because he’ll be understandably upset, but because those seats were always more than tickets to him - and eventually they became more than tickets to me. My father and I have always had a wonderful relationship. A loving one. He and my mother watched almost every game I ever played growing up. He’s an incredible grandfather, a great father-in-law, a devoted husband, and a generous man. But when I think about the gifts he’s given me over the years, there’s one that stands above the rest: he shared those seats with me. Besides love itself, that may have been the greatest gift he ever gave me because it helped to galvanize the connection between us.

And just because we won’t own those seats anymore doesn’t mean that part ends. My dad will still be at some games, I’m sure. So will I. Ann and Lily will be there too, sometimes, I suspect. Next season, when the camera sweeps across the floor near the visitors' bench, I’ll know exactly where to look - Section 124, Row AA, seats 19 and 20. And I hope that sitting there is a kid and his dad. Because that’s really how this whole thing works. Someone brings you to the game. Someone teaches you to love it. And one day, you realize the place where it all started might not have been the arena at all. It might have been a playground at 10th and Lombard. And if that kid and his dad are sitting there together, watching the ball bounce and the crowd rise and fall the way it always has in Philadelphia, then everything is still exactly the way it should be.